Though the firm has proved the principle, a single pore would take about 70 days to sequence an entire human genome (which has roughly the same number of letters as 1, 000 Russian novels).

ECONOMIST: Nanopores may lead the way to a new generation of sequencing

The monumental effort to sequence the entire human genome -- to spell out the 3 billion or so combinations of those letters in a cell's DNA -- is keeping a lot of academic and commercial laboratories busy.

FORBES: Biology in silico